“Must be growing up now, Mrs. Peale. They’re older than Teddy.”

“You remember them, they came by at Halloween.”

“I don’t think I saw them.”

“Oh, they were here all right. You must remember. One was the devil and the other was a skeleton. You gave them a bag of marshmallows.”

“Of course.” Rosie stood at the kitchen window, drinking coffee. The kettle shrieked.

“Breast high.” Mrs. Peale poured.

“How’s that?”

“The nails. They’re driven in at breast height. Special nails, from Peru.”

“From Peru. Fancy that.” Well, of course—tin mines, Incas, all that: Why not?

“Yes, Peru, Illinois. If you’ll leave that cup. I was just turning on the dishwasher.”

Upstairs, Rosie had forgotten to make the beds. She pulled the sheets down, then up again, and thumped the pillows. The dishwasher pounded below, cars swished on the highway. Mrs. Peale turned the vacuum on again. The furnace started up with a gasp and throbbed lightly and quickly through the floor and walls, as if the house had had a bad fright.

All the time, Rosie thought, silence is being broken.

The silence, first broken when Rosie started school, was until then a long afternoon passed in gardens, or on beds where she held a doll and charted shapes in figured wallpaper. At school, however, her train of thought had been permanently disrupted. Voices, there, were sharp, always questioning, always demanding an answer—as if they, not she, were in need of an education. To the question “What does that make?” she had replied, “Four,” and surrendered forever. Later she came up with other answers—“The Great Fire of London,” “The Treaty of Utrecht,” “Dryden”; or “I don’t know”—this particular answer was not unrelated to silence. She recited out loud the fruits of others’ silences. There were questions that gave answers, replies that were merely questions—a chain reaction of interrogation that sputtered along for years.

During that time silence was tolerated only when it had official sanction: “Silence, girls,” someone said loudly. One developed the ability to stare at a page, even to read, without breaking into one’s state of mind. Each November a morning assembly began with two minutes’ obligatory silence—the only silence into which no girl ever managed to giggle, growing up as they were in the shadow of the Great War and the Great Depression, and some baffled sense of shame that two such events had been allowed to come about.

Mrs. Peale turned off the vacuum. Rosie sat on her child’s bed. Her flesh tingled with the blows of the hundred hammers on the Peruvian nails. Two minutes’ silence. Why two minutes? Was that as much as anybody could be expected to stand, thinking about the First World War? Ought it to be cumulative, if intended as a tribute to the dead? In that case, by now should we not be permanently dumbfounded, speechless with horror?